Get the Dynamics of Narrative Change Right by Centering the Community

 

The following is a transcript of the video above, from our webinar on “Remaking the Economy: Information, the Media, and Economic Justice.” View the full webinar here.

 

Candice Fortman: We have this boredom, sometimes, as people who work in this industry: “Well, you know, I told this story, I’m moving on to my next story, because it’s about me, right? It’s about what my interests are, the things I think will help me become a popular, successful journalist. The things that’ll help me win awards.”  

 

It can’t be about you. You have to remove yourself from the conversation and center your community. And that means that if you write five stories about bus transportation every week for the next five years until somebody fixes the bus system, oh well! Here we still are, writing the same story until something changes. And I think that that is not how we have thought; we’ve stopped thinking about news in that way, that you continue to tell a story until it catches. 

 

I think that’s why I love the fact that I didn’t come out of J-school (journalism). I came from a marketing and public relations background, and so that means that I was taught that your audience does not hear a message until maybe the tenth or twentieth time that you’ve said that message. They are actually not listening to you the first time. So that means that if you take that sort of idea of marketing and PR, and you put it into the production of journalism, that means you should be telling and writing that same story over and over again, until something actually changes.